They’re trained at the Academy how to make a collar, fire a gun, appear credible when they testify and not let the reasonable requests of the people they’re hired to protect and serve bother them too much. But what about them? Are they not human beings with needs too?
A morbidly obese city cop got a hefty pension when he retired on disability at age 43, but he’s still hungry for more dough — so he’s suing the NYPD, claiming the job left him corpulent.
“The job is like a tyrant,’’ said ex-NYPD Officer Jose Vega, who is 5-foot-10 and tips the scales at 360 pounds.
Could it be the . . . donuts?
Vega, 46, a former Marine, said that when he first joined the department in 1997, he weighed in at a svelte 180 pounds.
“My goal was to become a first-grade detective and homicide detective,’’ he said.
But “they brainwashed you. ‘Go out and make arrests.’ The job would emphasize arrests without concern for any officer’s heath [sic],’’ said the former cop, who worked in the Bronx’s 42nd Precinct.
Some might suspect the “go out” part would mean walk around, get a little exercise, the sort of thing that, although not expressly intended to make a cop healthier, would nonetheless do the trick. Not so, Vega complains.
“I went from 250 to 395 pounds in one year — I guarantee you, as small as you are, you eat more than me,” he told a Post reporter Tuesday, insisting it was the slew of health problems caused by the stress of his former police job that led to his mass weight gain, not his eating habits.
Then again, when suing the NYPD for becoming large, it would behoove an ex-cop to get his story straight with his lawyer.
Vega’s lawyer, Warren Roth, said it’s clear that the job of a cop isn’t conducive to healthy eating.
“It’s easier to pull into McDonald’s and wolf something down when you’re busy,’’ Roth said.
Well, sure it’s “easier,” just like it’s easier to toss a black kid against a wall when you need to make your quota rather than walk around and keep your sharp eyes peeled for something remotely resembling articulable suspicion of something other than being an easy target.
Vega said that as the stress — and his weight — soared, he finally called it quits in 2014, retiring on a $4,000-a-month disability pension.
The next year, he applied for three-quarters disability — or a $6,200-a-month pension — arguing that his debilitating condition was caused by his police work.
But the medical board determined that only about 10 percent of his medical condition was related to job stress.
For those of us whose pension will amount to a grand monthly total of $0, you should understand how sad this must be for a police officer. How is he supposed to survive on a mere $4,000 per month at 43 years of age, when he was still young enough to get a job if only he lost some weight?
“They acknowledged my condition, but they didn’t care,’’ Vega said.
“I know some people who have gotten disability pensions for a damaged pinkie finger, and here I am with a main organ in my body [the heart] that’s defective, and I’m being denied.’’
He said his obesity came from ventricular hypertrophy.
Perhaps those who got disability pensions for their damaged pinkie finger need to be revisited, but that’s not what Vega is arguing. It’s true that the job can be stressful. It’s certainly not for everyone, for a great many reasons beyond stress-induced obesity, heart disease and the loss of time waiting on the drive-through line at McDonald’s. But did anyone promise cops that the job was all about them?
“My cheat days are Mondays.”
Some things you’re taught in the Academy never leave you.* Maybe the job wouldn’t have been so stressful if you didn’t have cheat days at all.
*Okay, cheap shot.
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“How is he supposed to survive on a mere $4,000 per week”
It’s $4,000 per *month*, not per week. Which is still more than enough for sitting at home on the couch, of course…
Weird thing is that I originally wrote “hour,” but then I realized I might be projecting. Same with my initial typing of “maple bacon donuts.” Muscle memory is hard to resist.
Ha. Is the weight the basis of his disability?
A ponderous question.
Wanted to be a first-grade detective eh? He’d have to graduate from being a kindergarten cop first.
The young always have dreams of glory.
One of my colleagues always jokes about how many Mondays there are in his week. It’s crystal clear now that too many Mondays could be lethal.
NY Post, today:
“That cop, all he did was f–king eat,” said a source who worked with Vega in The Bronx’s 42nd Precinct.
Another cop recalled once seeing Vega walk into the stationhouse carrying a pound cake.
“We said, ‘Why did you bring this in? What’s the occasion?’” the source said.
“He said, ‘There is no occasion, I brought it for myself.’”
A source also said Vega especially enjoyed gorging on a starchy Caribbean-style dish of twice-fried plantains called “tostones.”
“He would eat like a plate of those. That was one of his favorite things,” the cop said.
“He’d eat them like they were Skittles.”
Tostones are delicious.
Pound cake french toast is the best thing you will ever eat for breakfast. A side of bacon and real maple syrup.
I am a big man. When I switched from walking campus at college to going behind a desk, I ballooned, and I didn’t stop until my wife gave me the surgery ultimatum. To use the Wheel of Fortune phrasing, I am now in a National Weight Loss Program, and I’ve lost about half of my excess weight. (Not to get too specific, but I started a little above Mr. Vega’s top weight.)
I have empathy for people who have trouble overeating, because I do it too. But the first thing you have to realize is that it’s not your employer’s fault. It’s not your parents’ fault, or your co-workers, or the phase of the moon. It’s your fault. If you gain weight, you’re eating too many calories, and you have to eat less and exercise more to lose the weight yourself. The diet he is describing now is still high in calories, especially for someone who’s insulin intolerant or extremely efficient processing sugars (yup, like me). And I won’t even go into that “cheat day” quote…
This man should never have been given a pension. He should have been given short term disability and either an appointment with a weight loss surgeon or an appointment at one of the “shakes and meals” weight loss places like I’m going to. Once that was done, they could move him into a job that he actually CAN do in his improved physical condition (like every private long term disability insurance operates).
You know, if he had claimed a bad back from wearing the two tons of gear that is required, I might have some sympathy. Eating himself to blimp status is on him.
So they don’t care about cops’ health, but it’s not about self-blimping.
I’m a fat electrician with no state pension. Fuck that guy.
Thank you for not posting crack pics to prove it.
Get your trades right… Plumbers have the”crack.”
Plumbers just get all the publicity. Sparky’s cracks are underappreciated.
“underappreciated.”
Not sure that word means what you think it does.
Here’s how to solve a bunch of problems with one modification. Put all police, firemen, teachers, and politicians on social security – NO RETIREMENT GRAVY TRAIN.
It’s a huge scam, all their claims of injury, solely for the purpose of boosting up their already huge retirement checks. We have superintendents here in southern California pulling down $250,000 FOR NOT WORKING! Are you kidding me? This is after they *earned* $300,000 or more per year before retiring.
Do any of you on socialist insecurity make a fraction of $250,000 a year?
It helps to know how public sector jobs ended up with 20 and out vested pensions, and how public sector unions have made it impossible to eliminate them. When you don’t know any of these things, it’s easier to see a solution of eliminating what isn’t so easy to eliminate.
Police and fire jobs. I don’t think the 20-and-out is common for public sector generally. Police and fire systems also tend to have retirement ages of 50 or 55.
Pensions still vest at 20 in most departments.
Out here in flyover country, 10 is fairly common for vesting. But it’s “cliff vesting,” meaning that if they leave the day before their tenth-year anniversary, they get their contributions back and leave with no benefit. Once they hit ten years, they have a non-forfeitable benefit and it grows with a percentage multiplier for each additional year, up to a maximum cap that is usually 70% or 75% of their average comp over their last 3, 4 or 5 years. Some cities have complicated DROP features. Nobody gets anything like California scale, but it’s enough to live on, and they leave at ages where a second career is still completely possible. Even so, they seem to be having a lot of trouble recruiting at all levels.
California is a special case, and hardly representative of how things are around the country as a whole. Those humongous pensions are the result of California’s sky-high cost of everything, plus having sold the state government to public employee unions some years ago. Unfortunately it is causing California to leak all over the rest of the country as pensioners relocate to other states to live like kings and queens on their California pensions, all the while expecting to bring the madness with them.
What a perfect opportunity to opine on the 50 truffles I sent you so I could earn frequent flier miles.
I’ve determined if I spent $7325 , I’d earn enough miles for a roundtrip first class ticket to Europe as well as 323 boxes of truffles (there’s a 10% product bonus on the back end, so to speak).
Since each truffle has 105 calories as I’m sure you noted from the insert, I could send you 1,695,750 calories of truffles.
Assuming, arguendo, you added these to your regular diet over time, and using a standard of 3500 calories per pound, you’d gain 484 pounds.
Can you earn a disability pension I can plug into the calculation, because Mrs. Judge K pointed out I failed to account for wardrobe costs?
I’d argue the increased expected value from your life insurance.
Perhaps you’d like writing surrounded by 16,150 truffles more than writing alone?
You know what goes well with 50 truffles? Pears. And you know what goes well with pears? Stilton. I don’t know how many calories Stilton has, but I’m pretty sure the pears offset them.
So Scott doesn’t share? Good to know.
I have yours right here.